[18][19] Abel Azcona was born on 1 April 1988, as the result of an unwanted pregnancy, in the Montesa Clinic in Madrid,[20] an institution that was run by a religious community.

[21] His father's identity is unknown, and his mother, a drug user and prostitute called Victoria Luján Gutiérrez, abandoned him at the clinic a few days after his birth.

[1] Azcona was then raised in the city of Pamplona with this man, who continuously went in and out of prison, and his family, which was unstructured and linked to drug trafficking and delinquency.

[23] This meeting in the penitentiary center led to the baptism of Azcona when he was uncommonly old, in a parish located in front of the prison, requested by the woman, who became his godmother.

[1][40] In 2011[41] and 2012[42] his artworks started gaining greater relevance,[43][44] but in 2012 he was admitted to two psychiatric clinics, one in Barcelona and the other in Pamplona, where he stayed for some time as he had deep mental issues and had made a serious suicide attempt.

When he came out of the centres, he made a performance demonstration, totally naked and sitting on a chair, to interrupt traffic on one of the main streets of Pamplona.

It is obvious that ending in the streets of Madrid, city where my mother abandoned me, navigating through an environment of prostitution and drug abuse, the only two aspects that I had known of her, was not the result of chance.

For the first time, I felt like I went back to who I used to be: the kid born from a woman dominated by heroin and the abuse of men and the market, inhabiting and roaming the streets of the city in which she accidentally gave birth to me.Empathy and Prostitution is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content.

The depictions of the performance piece have been exhibited in museums such as the Palais de Tokyo and the Perrotin Gallery, and also displayed at the Piasa auction house in Paris.

The New York exhibition and auction at Paddle8 promoted sexual diversity and featured artists such as Haring, Bourgeois, Goldin, Mapplethorpe, Warhol, and Azcona himself.

In this, physical or even sexual contact with the artist was required to enter the venue of the event, which was held at Grace Exhibition Space and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art[50] in New York City.

In 2016, Azcona activated his last sex-themed piece in this series, La Guerra (The War), which premiered at the Intramurs Festival in Valencia, Spain, which was again inspired by prostitution, criticism and sexuality.

It was also a social critique, where the artist explored the limits of his body by repeating patterns of sexual abuse, things which occurred in his own childhood and in the life of his mother.

[55] The Death of the Artist was both a continuation of his earlier works and closure of the series, being performed in 2018 in the lobby of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.

[55] In addition, the Círculo de Bellas Artes presented a complete reading of a manifesto titled The artist's presumption as a radical and disobedient subject, both in life and in death.

[64] The latest exhibition in Lleida was presented in Tatxo Benet's collection, which included works by Azcona, Ai Weiwei, Francisco de Goya, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

In November 2018, through a conference and live performance by artist Abel Azcona in the Bogotá Contemporary Art Museum the work Spain Asks for Forgiveness (España os Pide Perdón in Spanish) began, a piece of critical and anticolonialist content.

[77] The Shadow is a conceptual work consisting of performance art, an installation, and photography, as a denunciation of dozens of child abuse cases.

With the collective of himself, Vilks, Nørgaard, the writer Salman Rushdie and the cartoonist Charb (who was killed in the Charlie Hebdo shooting), Azcona carried out performances and conferences about freedom of speech in the Krudttønden between 2013 and 2015.

[80] Abel Azcona, the son of a prostituted woman who is looking for his whoremonger father, because it perfectly summarizes everything that the patriarchy has built on their subordination and for our autonomy.

The piece, in which Azcona joins all the Spanish political parties, is a critique of the system that prioritizes economic interest over true ideology.

Descendants of victims make up the installation in a row in front of the monument, all symbolically buried with soil from the garden of one of the participants, where his relatives had been shot.

For him, it is about inciting memory, individual and collective (and, therefore, historical).In 2016, Azcona coordinated a new performative action, or happening, with relatives of those who were shot in the Pozos de Caudé.

[93] The artist was to remain for 60 days in a space built inside an art gallery of Madrid, with scarce food resources and in total darkness.

Azcona remained inside a garbage container strategically located in the center of the Biennale as a criticism of the artist's own gestation and the market of contemporary art itself.

[107][106] The body in the art work of Abel Azcona is the stage of re / presentation, place of the event where memory grief, affection and identification, appear in the complex relationship between perceptor-performance-receiver.

Azcona's performances are the place of possibility -even- of the unspeakable, spacing for memory, grief and the question of violence.Azcona has been involved in several controversies and legal proceedings.

[108] Later, during his self-confinement in the work Dark Room, public opinion was against the harshness of his self-imposed deprivation of liberty and food, generating controversy.

[113] During a Miami exhibition in 2015, twelve children walked into a performance inside the art gallery with guns in their hands, which was a critique of the laws and the permissibility of weapons in the United States.

[136] Two years later, in 2018, he was denounced by the Francisco Franco National Foundation for exposing a signed detonation report for the Monument of the Valley of the Fallen.